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May 23, 2006

Whitehall exposed .....

I know I should not gloat, but I can't help myself, it is almost too good to be true. At long last the incompetence of both the civil servants and the ministers is laid bare for all to see in the disaster zone that is called the "Home Office". For me the simple wonder is that it has taken this long to become public! It has been a standing joke within the civil service for years that the Home Office was so incompetent it would take years for them to even find their own a***s with both hands - so why does it take a string of murders and rapes committed by prisoners who should have been kept in jail literally for life or ejected from the country as soon as they were paroled, to bring it into the open?

It is refreshing to see that a government commissioned report actually accuses Ministers of piling on "unnecessary" legislation which has made the co-ordination and day to day running of the Home Office impossible. I note that they stopped short, apparently, of identifiying the offending legislation, but I suspect that most people would start with the infamous Human Rights Act and continue from there. Who in their right minds except the peculiar class of mentally deficient or perhaps mentally ill advisers that Blair has surrounded himself with, would consider that giving the burglar, mugger and serial murderer the right to sue their victims for injuries sustaned fduring the commission of a crime could possibly be good for justice? It really does take a peculiarly twisted mindset to think that way.

As debacle after debacle is exposed at the Home Office - a senior Civiol Servant admitting cheerfully that he does not have the faintest idea of how many illegal immigrants are in the country followed by the revelation that his own section is employing a large number of them is embarrassing, but then there's more! The prison service (also a HO Section) admits that dangerous prisoners are being sent to "Open" Prisons after a "risk assessment" (no doubt conducted by the said dangerous prisoners friends and relatives!) and are simply dissappearing. Three hundred in one year from a particular prison near where I live! The ludicrous PC demand for the punitive treatment of middle class offenders on comparatively minor misdemeanours while muggers, murderers and rapists are treated leniently is bad enough, but then you also discover that our prisons have an almost revolving door policy whereby a prisoner is released early to make way for a new arrival - frequently reoffending within days!

The report concludes that the Home Office is utterly unable to act in a cohesive or efficient manner - and that is probably an understatement. Prisons are a mess, passports are a mess, immigration is a joke, nationalities division seems to have a nice little number going in the line of sexual favours gets you a nationality registration, the police are in ruins and there has not been a single head roll from among the bombproof incompetents who have created this mess! Much as I would like to say it is all the fault of Blair and his Labour cronies, I can't. The debacle that is Whitehall is a creation of the thinking that subscribes to the view that any idiot with a degree and the training offered by that expensive and luxurious Country Club operated by the Civil Service for the Civil Service and laughingly called the "Civil Service College" can manage any function without any specialist knowledge. In this day and age only someone with fairies at the bottom of the garden and who sees Santa arriving on our rooftops with a sleigh drawn by six reindeer still believes that!

I wonder how much longer we will have to wait to see this bunch of rule making, power broking, paper shufflers get what is due to them for their utter incompetence? Probably far too long! In the meantime they have all but ruined every public service from the mail, through police, fire services, ambulance services, health services and every other service they claim to be "managing". The simple truth is that they are incapable of managing the tea club, never mind the nations assets! And, while we're at it, lets not forget the Treasury, the bunch who, year on year "manage" the economy by demanding arbitrary reductions in budget of X% across the board, then have to find extra cash to fund things late in the year when there is a danger that some vital service will cease to function because of mismanagement and impossible budgeting. Inevitably a cut translateds into job losses, and job losses translate into more social dependency and more demands on the Department of Social Security which measn - ah! More tax and a growth in the Social Security budget! So any "savings" are immediately consumed by the growth in the DSS budget and in the numerous extra civil servants hired to "manage" it.

There is, howver, one item in the news at present which must demand the head of the relevant civil servants on pikes around Whitehall. I refer to the Criminal Records Bureau searches and clearances - another of Blair's draconian measures which still failed to pick up the Soham murderer! This Department has managed to destroy, through their incompetent handling of data, the lives of several thousand people who they have issued "Criminal Records" reports for thus barring them from jobs in a very wide range of fields. Some lost places at university, and some lost jobs. The arrogant SOB who fronts this incompetent troop has refused to apologise and claims that there is no long term harm to any individual from the mistakes. Just shows how much he knows about the system he and his halfwits have set up. Once the CRB has issued a report sayying you have a record, it goes in a register and even if the record is subsequently withdrawn as erroneous, the entry that it was issued remains on the register. Thus any future check brings up the original erroneous record .....

No there is no long term damage. There is only one cure, the Civil Service must be brought to heel, its power curbed and it must be radically downsized and reformed. If necessary the present Civil Service must be sacked in its entirity and replaced by something slim, mean, lean and efficient! We cannot afford to pour good money after bad any longer, the incompetents must be sought out and sacked - and the whole system opened up to scrutiny at every level. This incompetence cannot be tolerated for one moment longer.

As Cromwell is said to have told the House of Commons; "For too long you have brought disgrace upon this house; In the name of God, go!"

Posted by The Gray Monk at May 23, 2006 09:41 PM